It's a touchy subject, but passing the HSC takes one tablet
Date
October 12, 2012
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Rick Feneley
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Screen test … Harry Sanderson, 14, Reggie Ridlen, 15, Claire Darwell, 15, and Helena Salomon, 14, with their iPad yesterday. Photo: Kate Geraghty
NO CHILD will live without an iPad by the year 2013. And no parent will be spared the expense of buying that iPad … or, if their child is prone to losing things, insuring it.
This, at least, is the new edict at St Andrew's Cathedral School in central Sydney, which informed parents this week that it would require all students in years 7 to 10 to own an iPad from next year.
While that will set parents back $597 per iPad, the school expects hard-copy text books will be redundant within a few years, replaced by e-books that will offset the cost - and spare their children's backs. Almost all they need will be contained in that one tablet.
Several private Sydney schools are moving to compulsory tablets or other touch-screen computers, convinced they are vastly superior learning tools to the heavier laptops that were given to every year 9 to 12 student under the federal government's $2.4 billion Digital Education Revolution. Learning becomes agile. With wireless connections, a biology lesson could happen on a headland as well as in a science lab.
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Valuable learning time will be saved as students no longer need to trek ''from class to locker and locker to class'' as they fetch their text books for each new lesson, said the head of school at St Andrews, John Collier.
''I reckon the maths textbook is actually, like, 10 kilograms,'' said a year 9 student at his school, 14-year-old Helena Salomon. ''It's like weights training,'' adds her classmate Harry Sanderson.
St Catherine's, the Anglican girls school at Waverley, this year adopted the Samsung Series 7 Slate PC for all girls in years 5, 7 and 10. Soon all its girls will carry one. It preferred the Slate's extra tools that allow students to draw and hand write on screen. They still have to hand write their HSC, after all.
And it is only a little heavier than the iPad, though not in price. At about $1500 - and close to $2000 when programs are added - it might have provoked a revolt by parents. But no, said the school's head of information, Paul Carnemolla - ''not when they saw how much their daughters loved learning this way''.
''I've had kids sick at home joining in my senior physics class, doing the assignments with the other students. They can see my screen and hear me talk. I can watch what's happening on their screen.''
Textbooks become interactive. They can hyperlink to video.
Dr Collier expects no parental backlash at an information night next Thursday. ''This is the way kids communicate with the world.'' It would ''be folly to live in denial''.
One parent at the school did raise concerns with the Herald: the cost burden, certainly, but also her sons' internet ''addiction'' and their ever-increasing hours in front of screens. And their genius for losing things.
Dr Collier acknowledges it will require vigilance from parents and teachers. His email to parents contains some tips on the loss of iPads: check that insurance policies will cover them, or put some financial responsibility on the child - ''e.g indicate that he may need to pay you for the replacement … or perform equivalent chores for it''.
with Amy McNeilage
Read more:
http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/...-one-tablet-20121011-27fru.html#ixzz292fy2MuV
